One of these core, fundamental differences lies in each party's base. A party's base is the soul of the party. They are the ones who will support the party above all else, who strive to make it the best it can be. The ones who are among the very low percentage of Americans who vote in primaries or non-Presidential election years. The ones who are the most rigidly ideological - conservative or liberal. The base pushes the party either more to the Right or more to the Left, depending on how far the party strays.
It is common knowledge that both parties are actually composed of several factions that together combine to make up a coalition of moderate-to-center-right and moderate-to-center-left organized political bodies. History has shown this to be the case for much of the last 100 years, with most policy being compromises that end up squarely in the middle of the political spectrum.
This common knowledge is, however, completely false. Two moderate, pragmatic American political machines, one center-left and one center-right, have not existed as such for at least 40 years, if not longer. Much of this is due to the increasingly right-ward drift of the Republican Party, whose conservative wing now composes the majority of members and for all intents and purposes is the party. There are barely any liberal Republicans any more, and moderate Republicans have mostly been purged.
With the Republican Revolution in the mid-1990s, when they took control of the House for the first time in over 40 years, the party's conservative wing had finally won an enormous victory (if you discount the 12 years of Presidents Reagan and Bush). This was followed up by the eight-year reign of President George W. Bush and a Republican Congress, who managed to spectacularly fail in essentially every single thing they did. Such failure was always going to happen because the Republican Party had become a party of fanatical ideologues whose only goal it was to enact their pet conservative policies, regardless of whether these policies worked.
Decades of right-wing economic policies and many socially-conservative victories in Congress have substantially shifted the country to the Right. The United States is now one of the most unequal industrialized countries in the world, while also managing to be the lowest-taxed, least-regulated, and most-dependent upon fossil fuels. It is a country in which it has become increasingly complex and difficult to get an abortion, receive already scanty unemployment benefits, but where it is spectacularly easy to purchase and carry a firearm in public.
The immense failure of the Right's policies can be seen in the explosion of the deficit, the racking up of enormous amounts of debt, engaging in two illegal, unfunded wars that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and severely tarnished the nation's reputation abroad, the absolute financial collapse of Wall Street which nearly completely ruined the U.S. economy, and allowed health care costs to rise unaccountably high due to intense opposition to the one thing is known to bring it down - some form of universal, single-payer coverage.
That this failure of conservative ideology has resulted not only in denial of its failings, but in a doubling down of voting in even more conservative conservatives is rather astonishing. But it speaks to the power of the Republican Party's base, and how the party itself caters to it. Republican office-holders will do anything, anything, to appease their base. They will pledge to destroy the economy unless taxes are not raised. They will stand on principle to oppose a health care bill that will lower costs. They will go back on literally anything they have said in the past that might compromise them now - Orwell would be nodding his head - all in order to appease their base. They will do all this because they are absolutely terrified of their base. And they have good reason to be. Republican primary voters have shown that they will not tolerate those who they consider to be insufficiently conservative. So, Republicans constantly harangue each other as to who is the most conservative, who is the true conservative, etc. They do this not only because they have to, but because being conservative is a good thing.
In contrast to the Republican Party's base, the Democratic Party hates their base. With a passion. It should be noted that, though Democrats are usually thought of as "liberals", most Democrats are not self-identified liberals. A plurality of Democrats are liberal, with many moderates and a substantial amount of conservatives. The Democratic Party, then, still embodies the old notion of a center-left coalition. Even though most moderates share almost every single belief that liberals do, "moderate" Democratic politicians often find themselves ostracizing their liberal colleagues. This has resulted in many moderate and conservative Democrats embracing right-wing, conservative, Republican policies that have truly been terrible for the country. As a result, national policies have skewed to the Right for several decades.
Whenever there is a complaint about this rightward drift from the Democratic Party's base - that is, from liberals - the "mainstream", "moderate" Democratic politicians like to push back against them to prove how "serious" they are. Liberals are branded as "extremists" and their complaints are not accepted. And they can do this because they know that nothing will happen to them. Nothing at all. Whereas Republicans are terrified of their base, Democrats hate their base. Democrats will not vote out a politician for not being liberal enough or for doing something that the Democratic Party does not stand for.
How many Democrats lost their primaries to more liberal politicians after voting for the War in Iraq? How many Democrats lost their seats after voting for the Bush tax cuts, or for cutting welfare, or for supporting de-regulation. or for passing the PATRIOT Act, or for voting against gay marriage, or anything else that went directly against liberal principles? The Congressional Progressive Caucus did not stand as a group and vote down the Affordable Health Care Act for not providing a public option or single-payer mechanism like the Tea Party Republicans almost certainly would have done (though this may or may not have been a good thing).
While Republican presidential candidates argue about who is more conservative, you would be very hard-pressed to get a Democratic candidate to admit that they are liberals. Being liberal is a bad thing, you see. It means you aren't "serious", that you are "out of touch". Of course, being conservative means exactly the opposite. This hesitancy to embrace liberalism and the corresponding "hippie-punching" that the Democratic Party regularly engages in with its base is due to the acceptance of the status-quo by liberal party members who do not vote with their principles. By accepting the Democratic Party's embrace of illegal wars, illegal torture, deregulation, unconstitutional surveillance activities, interventionist, warmongering foreign policies, liberals are accepting the status-quo. By not voting to change policies to fit their own values, like conservatives do, liberals allow the American political spectrum to shift to the Right. Inevitably this leads to compromise between the center-right and the Right. This is a terrible choice that inevitably also leads to terrible policies.
Therein lies another major difference between the two parties. Republicans are afraid of their base, while Democrats hate theirs. This divergence among the die-hard ideologues of both parties has resulted in creating a shadow United States, one that is somehow still a superpower but that also is only a fraction of the greatness it has the potential to be. One way to shift the dialogue, shift the spectrum, shift the nature of policies, is for liberal Democrats to gain a voice, stand up, and vote their conscience. They must make the Democratic Party responsible and accountable. They must return the party to its core whence it has for several decades been fleeing.
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